Eating Animals review – painful portrait of factory farming
Written by Peter Bradshaw
Natalie Portman narrates an unsettling documentary about how agribusiness resorts to ever greater squalor and cruelty
‘You vote at least three times a day with your fork,” says a farmer in this sombre, painful, relevant documentary about agribusiness from film-maker Christopher Quinn, based on the 2009 non-fiction bestseller by Jonathan Safran Foer, co-written with him and narrated by Natalie Portman, who was so energised by the book that it reportedly turned her into a vegan activist.
It’s a film that tells you what you already knew – and then made a conscious or unconscious decision to forget, if you are a meat-eater. Factory farming is a horrible business. The economics demand ever greater productivity under conditions of ever greater squalor and cruelty for the animals themselves: the normalisation of what is grimly known as “confinement agriculture”. Chicken McNuggets are the product of something pretty horrendous. Small farmers who are contracted by the big corporations to provide meat product are themselves treated as serfs, the upper homo sapiens layer of degradation.
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